9.
THE ONENESS OF RELIGION
BY DORIS MCKAY
I.
THE VOICE OF THE ANCIENT OF DAYS
PRIMITIVE man, for all his limitations knew awe, a quality which modern man has lost: primitive man, his intellect still unawakened, had the gift of wonder. He wondered at the sense of Presence that came with dawns, high winds, incoming tides, birth and death. There was a Force more powerful than his own hands, more fleet than his running footsteps. There was a spirit that decreed light and darkness, and knew the secret of fire before man stumbled upon it. Man, groping in intellectual halflight, personalized this force. Animism and pantheism were the results of his deductions from cause and effect.
Then the Voice of the Ancient of Days began to make Itself heard. It did not speak out of a cloud for all to fall face-downward and die in their terror, but to one man at a time. Here and there throughout the darkness of history some man heard God and told what He had said. To Zoroaster, Ahura-Mazda, (the Glory of God) said:
“My Name is I am . . . I am the Keeper, I am the Creator and Maintainer; I am the Discerner; I am the Most Beneficent Spirit!”
And to Moses the Voice said,
“I Am That I Am. Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am (Jehovah) hath sent me unto you . . . This is My Name forever, and this is My memorial unto all generations.”
In another part of the world the Voice raised again through Krishna has been brought down to us in the Bhagavad Gita;
"Know thou this, O Prince, that whenever the world declineth in virtue and righteousness; and vice and injustice mount the throne—then come I, the Lord, and revisit My world in visible form, and mingle as a man with men, and by my influence and teachings do I destroy the evil and in justice, and reestablish virtue and righteousness. Many times have I thus appeared; many times hereafter shall I come again.”
So faith in an Ancient Being became a legend, not in one part of the world but in many. There came to be an accumulated literature of the sayings of this Voice, a passed along tradition of His ways of coming.
It is man’s tragedy that, even as the untrained intellects of the growing race had proved inadequate in dealing with the idea of God in Nature, so did superstitions and half-truths creep into their interpretations of the words and situations which God had left. One was a regional difficulty: God’s revelation to a selected people was “final,” a culmination of all the remarks of God, until some prophetic time when the prophet, Himself, the Holy One, should come again in person. Another was the superstition that the prophet became God: the belief in the Incarnation. This had its reason in the fact that the Unknown Beneficent Power had borrowed, as it were, the personality of Him Who seemed to speak. The Power possessed Him, used Him, acted in Him like electricity in a dynamo, said “I Am,” but still was not identified with Him Whom God manifested. The people called God Him instead of It after they had seen one or another of the Men of God—true, the Ancient of Days had indeed personified, and the appellation would have been correct had they clearly understood that “He” meant God speaking on the human throne, and that He spoke while the throne kept silence. "For I spake not from myself” said Jesus, "but the Father that hath sent me, He hath given me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak.”
The tendency to fallacy was heightened
by the fact that it was but seldom
that religion was renewed. As whole centuries
[Page 836]
rolled around since
the phenomenon of the
appearance of God in a human temple had
occurred, men would forget, or develop
strange distortive dogmas, more especially
since the ancient holy books were hoarded
by the priests, and the knowledge of reading
belonged but to a few. We know that the
people before the coming of Abraham, and
Moses, and Christ, and Muḥammad, had
relapsed again into forms of paganism,
imagining an incarnation of the Divine Being in
the life about them and in the idols that
they built with their own hands of materials
from the mineral and vegetable worlds.
With the Voice obscured by time, there has
seemed little innate in man’s individual
intelligence capable of coping with the fact
called God.
Up until Muḥammad every prophet had to deal with these decadent paganistic practices. Muḥammad’s teachings made possible the investigation of natural laws and the rise of science by freeing His followers from a fear of natural forces, thus also dealing a death blow to animism. Forgetfulness of the Almighty in our day expresses itself in a higher form of pantheism consistent with the conceptions of the Greeks in the time of Plato and certain Muḥammadan and Christian mystics in the worship or enhancement of the Self, called the God Within, as defined by a diluted form of God-incarnation —an identification vigorously disclaimed by the founders of the world’s religions for themselves, let alone for their followers. Those with such a belief are referred to by Bahá’u’lláh as "those who have joined partners with God.”
Muḥammad calling for witness the stars in their courses played upon the primitive sensitiveness of His desert followers. Today we have learned how to make telescopes but we have lost touch with the stars. A device called the seismograph has robbed even the earthquake of our wonder. Those who are not aware of the Hour would call this the midnight of the Day of God. Yet, God or not—God is in the very fiber of human consciousness the world over. Man holds to some kind of a belief in God or he despairs. But the effectiveness of this God-consciousness is lacking as the near wreckage of a civilization warns us. It is because our bond with the essential Wisdom is broken—as is our bond with nature. It is as if some Secret of Being had become obscured; or as if a Spring had been hidden beneath leaves while the pilgrims fainted with thirst.
The marvel of it is that in our day of machines and machine-personalities the Ancient Beauty has come and has spoken again in unmistakable accents. The same signs of Godhead are there; the same significant Appearance, through Bahá’u’lláh; the same assertion that God has spoken through a chosen Messenger, and the Messenger’s testimony to that truth; there are the same authoritative statements in regard to the social adjustments which fit the age; the same poetry and mystery and power; the same sacrifice of the material welfare of the Messenger as an earnest of His sincerity in His Mission.
"Let thine ear be attentive,” Bahá’u’lláh admonishes us, "to the Voice of the Ancient of Days, crying to thee from the Kingdom of His all-glorious Name. He it is Who is now proclaiming from the realms above, and within the inmost essence of all created things: ‘I truly am God, there is none other God but Me. I am He Who, from everlasting hath been the Source of all sovereignty and power, He Who shall continue, throughout eternity, to exercise His Kingship and extend His protection unto all created things. My proof is the greatness of My might and My sovereignty that embraceth the whole of creation.’ ”
The declaration of the renewal of religion in this age cannot be set aside as superstition. The scientific method of ascertaining truth looks at effects: it marks the evidence of evolution whether in progressive social theory, or in the maturing of human character. The religions of the past have found a lasting place in modern man’s innermost soul by one means alone—by their fruits. The young tree of the new appearance of religion in our own day is radiant with bloom. It has stood resilient and unbroken before the winds of such tests as would have uprooted a lesser organism. It bids fair to spread its foliage over all mankind and to nourish the multitude upon its wonderful fruits.
II.
THE COMING OF REVELATION
Followers of Muḥammad celebrate an event which they call “The Night of Power and Excellence” commemorative of the time when a Voice from heaven is said to have informed Muḥammad of His prophetic mission. Every world religion has its equivalent tradition, its "night of power and excellence.”
It is as if, at the beginning of each religious cycle, a Miracle Play has been, not acted, but lived. The theme, the order, and the characters are familiar—only the setting is each time new. There is an unnatural darkness before the curtain is thrown back: the time of darkness is of a tribe or of a world. Then the sequence. Someone (a forerunner, a crier in the wilderness) has had foreknowledge of a Promised One, a Messiah. There is a gifted and eloquent Youth; He becomes aware of His destiny; begins to teach, and to attract and glorify His disciples. Inevitably He is feared and persecuted by the world, which angrily tries to shake free of His insistent voice. After His going, somehow a nucleus remains to keep alive His Teachings until that Word takes hold in a portion of the world.
Perhaps the most breathless moment of this Drama is at the coming of Revelation—that moment when the Ancient of Days speaks to His chosen Messenger. Our human imagination lingers among the records of the ancient manuscripts. The Man chosen of God has been shaken as knowledge of His mission has overtaken Him. He cannot believe it is true; but it is true. An intimation deepens into certainty. He is to receive direct inspiration beyond the ability of even His own mind to encompass. God-possessed, He is to hear words not His own issuing from His lips. For this Youth has become host to the Ancient Beauty, with Whom He shall henceforth be consciously identified, Whose bidding He shall unquestioningly obey, for Whom all His human qualities shall be crucified. Forever He shall leave His own pursuits and become a Shepherd of humanity.
The Zoroastrian Gathas tell us that Zoroaster (who is believed by modern Parsis to have lived about 1600 B.C.) was awakened to His mission by a succession of seven visions. Then one night (so the legend goes) the Bactrian peasants, who had been praying for help to the Supreme Being, saw a mountain suddenly burst into flame. Since a boy in His teens, Zoroaster (Zaratrustra) had lived in solitude in the lonely mountain retreats. Now in His flowing white robes He stood unscathed in the midst of the flames. Lit by the heavenly fire, they saw the Prophet descend from the mountain, bearing in one hand the sacred fire and in the other a rod, or wand, of cypress wood. We are not told what occurred on the mountain or what transpired in the heart of Zoroaster that He should have stepped from the life of a recluse right into the world, with the Word of God upon His lips, but to this initial experience we have reference in Zoroaster’s own words:
"When first I received and became wise
- with Thy words,
When obedience came to me with the
- good mind—
Verily, O Wise Lord, I believed Thee
- to be
The Supreme Benevolent Providence.”
Obedience to the vision took the form of acceptance of the divine Task as the next stanzas indicate—
“And though the task be difficult,
Though woe may come to me—
Thy message which Thou declarest to
- be best
I shall proclaim to all mankind.”
The Old Testament account of the coming of Revelation to Moses1 is as follows:
"The angel of the Eternal appeared to him in a flame of fire rising out of a thornbush. When he looked, there was the thornbush ablaze with fire yet not consumed! ‘I will step aside,’ said Moses, ‘and see this marvel, why the thornbush is not yet burned up.’
————————
1 Moffatt translation.
[Page 838]
God called to him out
of the thornbush saying, ‘Moses, Moses!’
He answered ‘Here
I am!’ And He said, ‘Do not come close;
remove your sandals from your feet, for
the place where you are standing is holy
ground.’ He said ‘I am the God of your
fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac and the God of Jacob.’ ”
The Ancient of Days, the I AM, according to the legend, outlined to Moses His Will for the rescue of the Israelites. Twice Moses spoke from His human plane, said “but,”—
“But suppose they will not believe Me, or listen to what I say; suppose they say, ‘Eternal never appeared to you.’ ”
The Eternal showed Him two miracles and told Him what to do. Still hesitating Moses said, “But, Lord, I am no speaker, I have never been and am not now, not even since Thou hast spoken to Thy servant; I am slow of speech. I have no command of words.”
And the Ancient of Days said to Moses (and we can see the Bush blazing higher with these words):—
“Who gives man his mouth? Who makes one man deaf or dumb, who gives him his sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the Eternal? Go then, I will be with your mouth and teach you what to say.”
Moses still could not accept this, so the Eternal sent Aaron, of easy speech, with Him, and together they accomplished the release of the Israelites from the Egyptians.
John, clad in his garment of camel’s hair, preached to the people, “There cometh after me He that is mightier than I, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose.”
When Jesus came from Galilee He asked John to baptize him. When the ceremony was completed and Jesus came out of the water “the heavens were opened unto Him and He saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and coming unto Him; and lo, a voice out of the heavens saying ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ ”
After His forty days of prayer and struggle in the wilderness, Jesus returned “in the power of the Spirit” to Galilee and to His own town of Nazareth. Calling for the book of Isaiah He stood up in the synagogue and read:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach
- good tidings to the poor:
He hath sent Me to proclaim release
- to captives,
And recovering of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty them that are bruised,
To proclaim the acceptable year of the
- Lord.”
Closing the book He said “Today hath this scripture been fulfilled in your ears.”
We have a closer picture of the coming of Revelation to Muḥammad. Mount Hira, near Mecca, has been described as “a huge, barren rock, torn by clifts and hollow ravines, standing out solitary in the full white glare of the desert sun.” This Rock or Mount was the Sinai of Muḥammad. No bush grew there to burn before His eyes while the Voice spoke, but here the celestial Visitor sought Him. He heard a Voice say “Cry” (recite). “What shall I cry?” Muḥammad answered; and the Voice said “Cry in the Name of thy Lord.” He thought He saw a vast, shadowy Presence and He fled down from the Mount toward Mecca.2
It is said that the people of the market place then saw Muḥammad grow thin and ill. Shadowed by the superstitions of His time He thought He was possessed of a devil. Khadija, His wife, told Him that an angel had spoken. According to tradition she believed in Him before He believed in Himself. He went back and forth torn between the Mount and the town. One night He could bear it no more—He would hurl Himself from the cliff. But the angel, inexorable and mighty, stood there between Him and His suicidal leap, and the Voice spoke: “Thou art the Messenger of God, and I am Gabriel.” Worn out in body and mind, the story tells us that Muḥammad again sought refuge in His Home, in Khadija. She wrapped His shivering human form in her cloak. But they were not alone even in the sanctuary of the familiar home, for the Presence of the Ancient of Days was there, as on the Mount. “O Thou, Who art wrapped,” said the Voice, “rise up and preach, and magnify thy Lord, and thy
————————
2 The word Qur’án translated means literally, the Crying.
[Page 839]
raiment purify, and
patiently wait for thy Lord.”
Old Waraka, learned in prophecy, was the first to hear this from Khadija. “By the Lord,” said the aged man, “He speaketh the truth. It is the beginning of Prophecy, and the great Law will soon come upon Him, as it did upon Moses.”
The Voice of Divine Inspiration spoke to Bahá’u’lláh far from the scenes of natural beauty that were a setting for the coming of Revelation to His Predecessors. He had been thrown with other followers of the Báb into a felon’s dungeon in Ṭihrán. The prison, called the Síyáh-Chál (Black Pit), was fantastic in its horror. Chained by the neck to another prisoner, His feet in stocks, in icy darkness and in filth, Bahá’u’lláh waited weary weeks for release or death. We have His written testimony that the Spirit of Revelation penetrated to Him in this Gethsemane. He recounts that although the galling weight of the chains and loathsome atmosphere of the prison allowed Him but little sleep, still there were moments of slumber when He felt as if something were pouring like a mighty torrent over His breast. It was as if this celestial torrent were descending from the summit of a mountain to precipitate itself over the earth. “All My limbs seemed to have been set aflame,” declared Bahá’u’lláh. “At such moments my tongue recited what mortal ears could not hear.”
Then, as Bahá’u’lláh bears witness in His Epistle to the Son of the Wolf: "One night in a dream this all-glorious word was heard from all sides: ‘Verily, We will aid Thee to triumph by Thyself and by Thy pen. Grieve not for that which hath befallen Thee and have no fear. Truly Thou art of Them that are secure. Ere long shall the Lord send forth and reveal the treasures of the earth. Men will give Thee the victory by Thyself and by Thy Name, whereby the Lord hath revived the hearts of them that know!’ ”
In His Discourse of the Temple we find a like reference. “But when I saw myself at the culmination of calamity, I heard from above my head the most wonderful and melodious voice, and when I turned I witnessed a Maiden (symbol of spiritual bestowal), of the celebration of the Name of My Lord, suspended in the air on a level with my head. . . . Then with her finger she pointed to My head, and addressed all those in heaven and earth saying: By God, this is the Beloved of the universe, but ye do not understand! This is the Beauty of God among you, and His Dominion within you, if ye are of those who know! This is the Mystery of God, His Treasure, the Command of God and His Glory, to those who are in the Kingdom of power and creation—if ye are of those who reason!”
In other references we find further efforts to describe for us those moments of "Power and Excellence”:
“God is My witness, O people! I was asleep on My couch, when lo, the Breeze of God wafting over Me aroused Me from My slumber, His quickening Spirit revived Me and My tongue was loosed to voice His Call. . . .”
“Whenever I chose to hold My peace and be still, lo, the voice of the Holy Spirit, standing on My right hand aroused Me, and the Supreme Spirit appeared before My face, and Gabriel over-shadowed Me, and the Spirit of Glory stirred within My bosom, bidding Me arise and break My silence.”
Finally, we find Bahá’u’lláh in a rhapsody of evanescence before the Adored One:
"I have no will but Thy Will, O My Lord, and cherish no desire except Thy Desire. From My pen floweth only the summons which Thine own exalted Pen hath voiced, and My tongue uttereth naught save what the Most Great Spirit hath Itself proclaimed in the kingdom of Thine eternity. I am stirred by nothing else except the winds of Thy will, and breathe no word except the words which, by Thy leave and Thine inspiration, I am led to pronounce.”
The statements of Bahá’u’lláh set down
within the last century have stepped outside
the category of tradition. Critics of the
source records of religion cannot say this is
mere religious lore passed on and modified
by generations of followers. Here is no
mythology. In the literature of the Bahá’í
Faith we have instead first—hand utterance
through an inspired Pen of the mystery of
the infusion of a human soul with the Spirit
[Page 840]
of Revelation. Was
it true experience or
delirium? Sufficient it is to those who call
themselves Bahá’ís that the divine Power
and the Ancient Wisdom should have
remained vested in Bahá’u’lláh for a quarter
of a century of unbroken Revelation, filling
no less than a hundred volumes with the
creative, living Word.
III.
THE VEHICLES OF GRACE
The study of Comparative Religion impresses us with the fact of mystery. There are mysteries in every religion, and usually they are the same mysteries. One comes to admit that the Prophets, separated from each other by hundreds of years and speaking often from a relative isolation, have expounded the same doctrines as if they had been read from one Book. The conclusion is that there is an ancient Truth in the world that is beyond the intellectual comprehension of man. To the Founders of the world’s religious systems alone was given an understanding, not acquired, because that would have been impossible, but innate. This knowledge was a state of consciousness which set them above the rest of creation. Degrees of intellectual and spiritual perception are noticeable among the grades of mankind: the prophetic consciousness was in the highest degree, the absolute. Therefore They knew and understood truths so profound that man’s relatively limited comprehension gives up before them. These then are the mysteries.
Chief among the mysterious allusions of the sacred books is that to the emanation of a spirit or state of super-being from the Supreme Power. This is known to us as the Holy Spirit. Associating this consciousness with religious experience William James says: "it adds to life an enchantment which is not . . . logically deducible from anything else. It is,” he says, “an added dimension of emotion.” Religious teachings pivot around the distribution of this divine uplifting grace.
In the Gathas of Zoroaster a Being emerges: Sraosha, or Srosh1 Ahura Mazda, the Supreme Being, has other helpers, "the immortal Benefactors,” who are the personification of His own attributes and bestowals (the “good principle,” omnipresence, prosperity, the earth, health, immortality), but Srosh was "the righteous,” "the beautiful,” "the Sword-bearer, the embodiment of the sacred Word.” He was referred to also as "he who walks teaching the religion around the world.” His presence was so tangible that he was referred to as a celestial person by Zoroaster. He is the angel who stands between God and man, the "great teacher of the good religion, who instructed the prophet in it.”
In the later Books, Christian, Muḥammadan, Bahá’í, Srosh was Gabriel—and the “angel of the Lord” was named Gabriel also in the Old Testament. He it was who appeared to Daniel, to Zacharias, to Mary, to St. John. It was to Gabriel that Muḥammad bore witness in testifying to the divine source of His revelation:
“One mighty in power, endued with understanding, taught it him: and he appeared in the highest part of the horizon. Afterwards he approached the prophet and near unto him until he was at the distance of two bows’-length from him or yet nearer; and he revealed unto his servant that which he revealed. . . . He also saw him in the lote-tree beyond which there is no passing; near it is the garden of the eternal abode.”2
Bahá’u’lláh mentioned the heavenly visitant in this wise: "Whenever I chose to hold My peace and be still, lo, the voice of the Holy Ghost, standing on My right hand aroused Me, and the Supreme Spirit appeared before My face, and Gabriel over-shadowed Me, and the Spirit of Glory stirred within My bosom, bidding Me to arise and break My silence.”3
The names for the spirit of Revelation used thus in the same connection leads to the supposition that Gabriel (Srosh) was a personification of the Holy Spirit, the sacred and hidden Word, the primal and supreme
————————
1 The Sacred Language, Writings and Religion of De Parsis, p. 307, Martin Haug, 1907.
2 Qur’án Sura LIII, Sales translation.
3 Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 103.
[Page 841]
intermediary between God
and man. “As the pure mirror receives
light from the sun
and transmits this bounty to others,” said
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, "so the Holy Spirit is the
mediator of the Holy Light from the Sun
of Reality, which it gives to sanctified
realities. . . . Every time it appears the world
is renewed and a new cycle is founded.”4
Because the Prophet, or Manifestation of God was the focus of this periodic flashing of a divine Ray, He too became a mediator, a Vehicle of Grace. Through Him the vitality and sweetness of a spiritual springtime is poured forth upon the world. Of the Christ Spirit (and it is an eternal Spirit) ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said, “The Christ is the central point of the Holy Spirit: He is born of the Holy Spirit; he is raised up by the Holy Spirit; he is the descendant of the Holy Spirit.”5 The pure and brilliant mirrors—the susceptibilities of the divinely endowed Messengers —blazed forth in the full glory of the heavenly effulgence and reflected it to the world of humanity. It was never a light from a personality, no matter how exalted, that shone upon the world, but the Light from the Supreme Apex.
Srosh, and Gabriel, manifestations of Spirit from a plane of unearthly splendor, have been captured for man’s imagination by the poetic imagery of Those Who knew their presence. We see the flashing of their swords, and the Glory of God shining around them, and the swift passage of their wings. So, also, do we visualize the personality of the Manifestation. Our love for His attributes is an emotion that makes Him a rallying point for the diverse humanity who are His followers. He is the Magnet around which the fragments of blue steel which are the hearts of His disciples group themselves in concentric circles: near or far. But that majesty that we worship, that divine patience amid the cruelest persecution, that tender and melting love, the ocean-like surge of His utterance, the power blended with sweetness, is of God. It is God’s Self. Compared with the stupendous glory of the Manifestation, the person is as another "Gabriel”—personification, another Sign of a hidden Mystery. Bahá’u’lláh provides us with an explanation in His Tablet of Manifestation:6
“In every world He appears according to the capacity of that world . . . So . . . in (the world of) bodies, in the world of names and attributes, . . . He appears unto them in His form, so that He, their Lord, may direct them, and draw them nearer to the seat of His Command, and cause them to attain to that which was ordained to them.
. . .
"Consider a goldsmith: verily he makes a ring, and although he is its maker, yet he adorns his finger with it. Likewise God, the Exalted, appears in the clothing of His creatures. This is through His favor so that His servants may not flee from Him, but that they may approach Him and rest in His Presence, hear His wonderful melodies and be benefited by that which proceeds from His mouth, and by that which He reveals unto them from the heaven of His Will. . . .
“Verily, were God, the Exalted, to appear in His (proper) grade and form no one could ever approach Him, or endure to be near Him. . . .”
Not that the Man does not exist. He has a two-fold nature, the physical and the spiritual; a double station. Bahá’u’lláh, discoursing on this distinction, quotes the words of Muḥammad to exemplify the dual functioning.7 In regard to the first station, that representing the Manifestation of God, Muḥammad said, “Manifold and mysterious is My relationship with God. I am He, Himself, and He is I, Myself, except that I am that I am, and He is that He is.” But from His second and human station Muḥammad declared, “I am but a man like you.” This is reminiscent of the paradox of Christ’s statements: "The Father and I are one;” “My teaching is not mine but His Who sent me.” So the Man, suffering, adoring, poignantly awake, racked between earth and heaven, prayed—sometimes in ecstasy, sometimes in agony of spirit to that Unseen but Evident Power to Which we also pray.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá further elucidating the mystery of the Manifestation informs us that the Holy Realities of the Manifestations of God have two spiritual positions: “One is
————————
4‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, p. 165.
5Some Answered Questions, p. 135.
6Bahá’í Scriptures, pp. 206-207.
7Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 66, 67.
[Page 842]
the place of manifestation,
which can be
compared to the position of the globe of the
sun, and the other is the resplendency of the
manifestation which is like its light and
radiance.” In the first of these positions He
is the “light-holder.” For example, Moses
is described in the Pentateuch as “a Man
with whom the Eternal had intercourse face
to face, unequalled for all the signal acts
which the Eternal sent Him to perform in
the land of Egypt . . . as well as for all the
mighty deeds and awful power which Moses
displayed in the sight of all Israel.”8
In the Gathas the individuality of Zoroaster (Zarathushtra) stands forth as the light holder:
"The Holy Zarathushtra—who first thought what was good; who was the first priest of the sacred fire; the first warrior, the first plougher of the ground; who first knew and first taught the Word of holiness, and obedience to the Word; who had a revelation of the Lord; in whose birth and growth the waters and the plants, rejoiced, cried out, “Hail!”9
“Now hath God been gracious unto believers,” declared Muḥammad, “when He raised up among them an apostle of their own nation, who would recite His signs unto them and purify them.”10
Jesus emphasized the truth that the Prophet is an intermediary between God and man, an actual conveyer of the divine light. Especially is to be noted His teaching in John where He exhorts His followers to “Remain in Me . . . I am the vine, you are the branches. He who remains in Me as I in him bears rich fruit (because apart from Me you can do nothing).”11 He was the central figure in a succession, or chain, of mediators of grace from the Supreme Being, that is to say, the Holy Spirit had descended on Him (“like a dove”), and He, in turn, had transmitted the divine meanings; now He advanced the doctrine which will eventually liberate the souls of men: that the power of the Holy Spirit can be passed on for the exaltation of those disciples who are on fire with His love. They will be enabled then, in their turn, to reflect the adorable attributes of the Christ Spirit, and become tributaries and channels of that same Spirit.
Bahá’u’lláh, the latest Manifestation of the Divine Spirit, teaches us that God has “focused the radiance of all His names and attributes” upon the reality of man, and "made it a mirror of His own Self.” These energies, He asserts, lie latent within man, "even as the flame is hidden within the candle.” The candle cannot light itself. It must be ignited from the Divine Fire. For the accomplishment of this supreme attainment (to summarize our argument) Bahá’u’lláh teaches, “there must be manifested a Being, an Essence, who will act as a Manifestation and a Vehicle for the transmission of the grace of the Divinity Itself, the Sovereign Lord of all. Through the teachings of this Day Star of Truth every man will advance and develop until he attaineth the station at which he can manifest all the potential forces with which his inmost self hath been endowed. It is for this very purpose that in every age and dispensation the Prophets of God and His chosen Ones have appeared amongst men, and have evinced such a power as is born of God and such might as only the Eternal can reveal.”12
————————
8 Deuteronomy, XXXIV, 10-12, Moffatt translation.
9 Seven Great Bibles, Alfred W. Martin.
10 Sale’s Koran, Sura III.
11 John XV, 4-10.
12 Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 67-68.
IV.
THERE IS BUT ONE GOD
According to the Qur’ánic story of Abraham this happened: "What,” said Abraham to the Chaldeans, “are these images to which ye are so entirely devoted?”
The Chaldeans, answering as man does even today when his faith is challenged, answered, "We found our fathers worshipping them.”
"Verily,” said Abraham, “both you and your fathers have been in manifest error. . . .
Verily, your Lord is the Lord of the heavens
and the earth: it is He Who hath created
them, and I am one of those who bear witness
thereof. . . . By God,” declared the
youth, "I will surely devise a plot against
[Page 843]
your idols . . . after
ye shall have turned your backs!”
Archeologists have commented on the whiteness of the moonlight on the site of the ancient city of Ur. The shrines of the Moon-god Nannar, and the Moon—goddess Nin—Gal were in the heart of that city occupying a large place. They say that the Moon-gods were surrounded by the images, in human form, of the countless minor gods of their retinue. “He went into the temple,” said Muḥammad, “where the idols stood, and he broke them all in pieces except the biggest of them that they might lay the blame on that.”
When Abraham was accused before the assembly, he said, "Ask them, if they can speak.”
“Verily, thou knowest,” protested the Chaldeans, “that these speak not.”
“Do ye therefore worship, besides God, that which cannot profit ye at all, neither can it hurt you? Fie upon you,” cried Abraham, “and upon that which ye worship besides God:”1
The presence of the one true God haunts the Old Testament. The story in Exodus tells us that Jehovah had given Moses “two tables of testimony, tables of stone written with the finger of God.” The first of the laws that He had revealed for the Israelites had been this: "Ye shall have no gods but Me. You shall not carve any idols for yourselves the shape of anything in heaven or above or on the earth below or in the sea. You shall not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the Eternal, your God, am a jealous God. . . .”
But when Moses, hastened by Jehovah, descended the mountain with the tablets written on both sides in His hands, what did He hear? There was such an outcry that Joshua (who attended Moses) thought there was war in the camp. But Moses recognized the answering cries of ritual! it was a chorus of men’s voices singing; when He came near enough to see the camp He saw the people dancing around the image of a golden calf.
Moses, fresh from the presence of the Ancient of Days upon the mountain, with His awful admonitions ringing in His ears above the din of the idolatry, threw down the precious tablets, breaking them, and hurled Himself upon the image of the calf. The legend says that He both melted it and ground it to powder. He put the powder into water and made the idolators drink it down. Then standing at the entrance to the camp He shouted in His leader’s voice: “Who is for the Eternal? Come over to Me. . ”
Is it for us to quibble over the details and historic authenticity of these tales of the one true God? We are not historians: rather are we tracing a trend in religious thought, a concept. There was a tendency to fetish worship and idolatry which was a pull back to man’s primitive past, a pull away from evolution. Inspired Leaders arose with a God-given wisdom, a God—power, whose mission it was to combat the retrogressive tendency. According to the literature of all religions, Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Christian, Muḥammadan, the prophets dominated men while they could, spoke of reward and punishment, led them onward in accordance with a destiny, called their souls back from primordial slime. There was a creative social Principle at work, a coordinative Center set up like a Sun. Man’s sin then (as now) was to turn away from that Center.
The effect of the teachings and influence of the Hebraic sequence of prophets and administrators was that when Jesus came He did not have to spend His precious months of teaching on the breaking up of the worship of actual graven images. Unique among the peoples of that time the Hebrews were not idolators. Jesus was free to attack through His teachings a more subtle infidelity to the one true God. He threw the money-changers out of the temple; He searched the hearts for the hidden altar to Baal; He distinguished between the quick and the dead—family could be an idol, possessions and power, old ways of living, individualism. Those things from which man could not unrivet his gaze when the Christ-call sounded were the idols. Because of those happenings, mysteriously hinted at in the ancient manuscripts which comprise the Old Testament, there were ready in the time of Christ a few, a nucleus, who were ready to cast away the Christ—defined idolatry and to carry the new tablets of the one God
————————
1Sura XXI, Sale’s translation.
[Page 844]
(those writ on the heart)
out into the border territory. Many listened.
Then, all too
soon, as the years passed into centuries the
apostolic channels became clogged with
doctrine, and the subtle idols (self in its guises)
crept back into their niches.
“And Jehovah said unto Moses. Hew Me two tablets of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets that thou breakest.”
Again God was merciful. He sent Another, and Another, and Another. He made new covenants. He revealed through new versions of the Mother Book, new vistas leading to the Promised Land—that Land which is called the Kingdom of God.
Suddenly, dramatically, in the seventh century after the appearance of the Christ in Palestine, the one true God established Himself in an out-territory, among the tribes of Arabia.
Arabia was then—and promised ever to be—a veritable stronghold of idol worship in its crudest form. The Ishmaelites (so-named from their belief in a descent from Abraham through Ishmael) had fallen early into those mistakes which the Israelites had made. Centuries of recession had piled one upon another. The dust of the desert itself was not equal to the gloomy dust of superstition that stifled the souls of those people. The story of the coming of Muḥammad is Hebraic in its masterful splendor and abruptness. With words that cut like knives Muḥammad managed to carve the consciousness of the one God into those resistant minds. We find ourselves incredibly transplanted to the earlier legend. It was as if Jehovah, Himself, the Eternal, after finding His chosen ones bereft of hearing in the Hour of Christ had turned back His attention upon the earlier and more primitive line.
In 629 Muḥammad came back to the Temple of Abraham and Ishmael, this time a conqueror of such power that He had but to appear before the gates of Mecca for that city to capitulate. Of all the populace He killed but four and these were executed in just punishment for their misdeeds. But Muḥammad was bent upon the destruction of another community, that of the gods in the temple of His forefathers. Followed by His ten thousand soldiers He came to the Kaaba. Had the gods there possessed a mind or soul instead of being the inanimate things that they were, they would have known the spelling of their ultimate doom nearly twenty years before. It was at that time that the angelic Voice on Mt. Hira had said to Muḥammad, "Cry in the Name of thy Lord!” In the years that had followed Muḥammad had declared His mission, suffered His period of persecution, had fled (in 622) out of Mecca at night and on His black horse to the City of Yathrib—soon to be called Medina, the City of the Prophet. He had then set up a temporal rule in Medina and administered the Law of God. Always He had taught the one God: "Your God is one God; there is no God but He, the Most Merciful. In the creation of the heaven and the earth, and the alternation of the day and night, and in the ship which saileth on the sea laden with what is profitable to mankind; and in the rain-water which God sendeth from heaven, quickening again the dead earth and the animals of all sorts which cover its surface; and in the change of the winds and the clouds balanced between heaven and earth—are signs to people of understanding. Yet, some men take idols beside God and love them with the love due to God.”2
Now the Meccans had treacherously broken their years of truth and the climax for the gods was no longer to be withheld.
There in the Kaaba the gods waited, Hobal, carved in red agate, the gold and silver gazelles, the images of Abraham and Ishmael. Ranged around these were three hundred sixty idols, one for each day of the lunar year, nature fetishes. As in His story of His ancestor Abraham, He struck the idols down—and this is a matter of record: while an idolatrous populace sighed He broke every one of the images, and with each crashing blow He shouted: “Truth is come, and falsehood is fled away. Verily, falsehood is evanescent!” With the images went every pagan rite. It was a deathblow to a whole vast system of idolatry. From the desert the tribes began giving themselves up to Him; enlisting under the banner of the one God.
————————
2 Sura II.
Book Exhibit
An exhibit of Bahá’í books placed on view at the Dean Hobbs Blanchard Memorial Library in Santa Paula, California. The librarian, Mrs. Gladys Kennedy, cooperated in making this display possible, which included recent Bahá’í books published in the U. S., pictures of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the Temple, some texts in Persian and Arabic, enhanced in attractiveness by flowers and Persian art objects. The exhibit attracted much attention.
THE DOCTRINE OF “DIVINE UNITY”
The demolition of the images was a deed performed in the world of material things. It was a vigorous lesson in the root doctrine of Muḥammad’s teachings: that of the "Divine Unity.” Readers of this series will recognize a recurrence of our theme in the following statement by a present—day adherent of the Prophet.3
“For thousands, for millions of years, there has been but one truth in the world. God, the Incomprehensible, the Unrecognizable, has sent it to mankind. Throughout the entire existence of the world, through all peoples and all cultures, through all times and all countries, there has been a steady procession of prophets, of holy ones, commanded by God to preach the primitive truth to humanity. . . . Their message was the same at all times. Faith in the prophets is the cornerstone of Islám.”
Another Muḥammadan writer4 carries the conception of unity farther: "God is one and so are His creatures. Unity springs from a belief in the Oneness of the Creator which spreads out and inspires everything in creation.”
The doctrine of Divine Unity can be resolved into precepts which are basic also in the Teachings of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, 1. The Unity of the Essence, 2. The belief in a succession of prophets, 3. The essential brotherhood of mankind. A more searching definition of polytheism was in the making. The belief in the actual incarnation of the God-essence in the person of the Prophet had crept out of Egypt and Greece and Rome into Christianity. Muḥammad protested against an idolizing of Jesus and Mary. He guarded His followers against a deifying of Himself. For to consider the prophets other than channels for the knowledge of God, to differentiate between them, worshiping
————————
3 Muḥammad, Essad Bey, 1936.
4 Muḥammad, the Prophet, Sindar ‘Alí Sháh.
[Page 846]
one while rejecting
others was to expose
one’s lack of comprehension of the true
implications of Unity. It was defined as
polytheism then: so is it now.
In our own day, Bahá’u’lláh, latest manifestation of the one true God, bears witness to His own dissociation, as a personality, with the Unknowable Essence: “Know thou of a certainty that the Unseen can in no wise incarnate His Essence and reveal it unto men. He is, and hath ever been, immensely exalted beyond all that can either be recounted or perceived. From His retreat of Glory His voice is ever proclaiming: 'Verily I am God, there is none other God besides Me, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise.’ ” But God moves Him entirely, as an instrument in His Hand: "As a token of His mercy . . . and as a proof of His loving kindness, He hath manifested unto men the Day Stars of His divine guidance, the Symbols of His divine unity, and hath ordained the knowledge of these sanctified beings to be identical with the knowledge of His own Self. Whoso recognizeth them hath recognized God. Whoso hearkeneth to their call, hath hearkened to the Voice of God, and whoso testifieth to the truth of their Revelation, hath testified to the truth of God Himself.” Explaining the Divine Unity again He says: “Inasmuch as these Birds of the celestial Throne are all sent down from the heaven of the Will of God, and as they all arise to proclaim His irresistible Faith, they, therefore, are regarded as one soul and the same person. For they all drink from the one Cup of the love of God, and all partake of the fruit of the same Tree of Oneness.”
“All is from God,” therefore all humanity: “Through each and everyone of the verses which the Pen of the Most High hath revealed, the doors of love and unity have been unlocked and flung open to the face of men. We have erewhile declared—and Our Word is the truth: ‘Consort with the followers of all religions in a spirit of friendliness and fellowship.’ ” "O contending peoples and kindreds of the earth! Set your faces toward unity, and let the radiance of its light shine upon you. . . . There can be no doubt whatever that the peoples of the world, of whatever race or religion, derive their inspiration from one heavenly Source, and are the subjects of one God. . .”
The one God recognized, we are ready to attack, with His help, the inner idolatry which is so firmly set up in the hearts of a forgetful world. “Arise, O people,” the Voice of the One God has called again in ringing tones, “and by the power of God’s might, resolve to gain the victory over your own selves, that haply the whole world may be freed from the gods of its idle fancies—gods that have inflicted such loss upon, and are responsible for the misery of, their wretched worshipers. These idols form the obstacle that impeded man in his efforts to advance in the path of perfection. We cherish the hope that the Hand of Divine Power lend its assistance to mankind, and deliver it from its state of grievous abasement.”
